{"id":968,"date":"2022-03-15T00:37:31","date_gmt":"2022-03-14T22:37:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/?p=968"},"modified":"2022-04-06T17:02:36","modified_gmt":"2022-04-06T15:02:36","slug":"thomas-thwaites-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/thomas-thwaites-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas Thwaites"},"content":{"rendered":"

Meta.Morf 2022 \u2013 Ecophilia \/ <\/span>Tr\u00f8ndelag Centre for Contemporary Art<\/a> \/<\/span> May 19 \u2013 July 31 \/
\nCurator: Zane Cerpina \/ Co-curator: Espen Gangvik<\/span><\/p>\n

Goatman\u00a0(A holiday from being human) \/\u00a02015<\/span><\/h2>\n
Thomas Thwaites [UK]<\/span><\/h5>\n

Goatman<\/span><\/i> began as a project to take a holiday from being human; to escape the stress and worry of being a person in human society with all its moral and practical complexities. There is a lot to worry about personally and globally, and with worry comes guilt and regret for failing to do ‘the right thing’. So: wouldn\u2019t it be nice to just trot away from it all and become a goat, free to roam, free from worry, free from guilt? To have a holiday not only from your day-to-day life, but from yourself as well?<\/span><\/p>\n

But underlying the project is a question about \u2018progress\u2019: the notion that our species and our civilization is progressing toward something better: our spinning of stories out of our pasts and our futures, our regrets and our hopes.<\/span><\/p>\n

I found trying to become a lowly, humble goat spiritually (as well as physically) uncomfortable: was I trying to go \u2018backwards\u2019, to de-volve? This discomfort led me to realise, that although I don\u2019t consider myself religious, I\u2019d been swept up\/indoctrinated in a secular grand narrative; that there is a hierarchy of species, and that despite a few setbacks along the way, a rationalist liberal high technology culture will ultimately emerge as the end of our history. The techno-optimist idea that we as a species are progressing and evolving away from our base, savage uncultured ancestors, and toward an enlightened post-human future, possibly even colonising other planets.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ernest Becker in the Denial of Death (1973), stated that currently \u2018we are gods with anuses\u2019: we\u2019re high-tech cyborgs able to transcend so much of our biology, but yet we still must succumb to our biology, eating and defecting, and ultimately will die and rot away. Becker argued it is cognitive dissonance arising from this dual view of ourselves, that drives our need to be part of grand narratives, be they religious, nationalistic, aristocratic, or techno-scientific. We can\u2019t quite face our knowledge of our own mortality, so we need to latch on to the idea we\u2019re part of something greater.<\/span><\/p>\n

The post-human answer to resolving this dissonance is to continue developing technology which will ultimately allow us to sever our link with our mortal fleshy biology, curing old age and death, and thus become fully god-like (and in the case of \u2018mind-uploading\u2019 to literally relieve ourselves from the necessity of having an anus).<\/span><\/p>\n

As I pursued my dream of becoming a goat I realised I\u2019d soaked in this optimistic vision of the future growing up, and at least subconsciously believed I was contributing in some small way to progressing human civilisation toward some kind of Star Trek future. And so <\/span>Goatman <\/span><\/i>became about enacting an alternative route out of our dissonance; to remove the godlike part in us. I wanted to personally come to terms with the idea that there is no \u2018human destiny\u2019 that we are all a part of, to stop thinking about \u2018the future\u2019 as a kind of destination, to stop striving, to remove humanity from the top of some imaginary hierarchy of nature, to expunge Descartes, and to present an alternative humble future of the post-human to aim for: the life of a goat on a hillside.<\/span><\/p>\n

Should we dream of a future amongst the stars, or should we dream of a future akin to the life of a goat on a mountainside?<\/span><\/p>\n

Thomas Thwaites
\n<\/strong>\"\"Thomas Thwaites is a designer interested in the social impacts of science and technology. He holds an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art, and a BSc. in Human Sciences from University College, London.<\/span><\/p>\n

His work is in the permanent collections of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the Banque De France (Cite de l\u2019Economie in Paris), and the Asia Culture Centre in South Korea. His work is exhibited at major galleries and museums worldwide, including at the National Museum of China, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the Science Museum (London), the Cooper Hewitt in the USA and La Triennale di Milano (Italy). He has spoken at numerous conferences, including TED and Design Indaba, as well as at universities and businesses worldwide. Press includes features in national newspapers including the New York Times, S\u00fcddeutsche and The Financial Times. He has presented a four part television series, aired on Discovery Channel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

He is the author of two books; <\/span>The Toaster Project, <\/span><\/i>and <\/span>GoatMan.<\/span><\/i> The Toaster Project <\/span><\/i>documents Thwaites\u2019 attempt to make an electric toaster from scratch. <\/span>Goatman <\/span><\/i>describes his project to take a holiday from being human by becoming a goat. Both are published by Princeton Architectural Press, and have been\u00a0 translated into Korean, Japanese and Norwegian.<\/span><\/p>\n

thomasthwaites.com<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

Header Graphics: “Goatman” by Thomas Thwaites. Photo credit: Tim Bowditch.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Goatman began as a project to take a holiday from being human; to escape the stress and worry of being a person in human society with all its moral and practical complexities.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1518,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-968","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ready","category-tssk"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=968"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2886,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/968\/revisions\/2886"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=968"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=968"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/metamorf.no\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=968"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}